


Love is a Cage

by semperama



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Friends With Benefits, Minor James T. Kirk/Spock, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-06
Updated: 2017-11-06
Packaged: 2019-01-30 05:41:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,935
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12647241
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/semperama/pseuds/semperama
Summary: Uhura and McCoy have two things in common: they both love Kirk and they both love Spock.Oh, and a third thing: Kirk and Spock don't love them back.





	Love is a Cage

**Author's Note:**

> Honestly I have no idea how this happened or what I'm doing. This is not at all in the universe of the first ever Star Trek fic I thought I'd ever finish, but here we are. I wrote this quickly and barely reread it so I couldn't talk myself out of posting it, so please forgive any errors.

McCoy’s office is the last place anyone would expect to find him during shore leave, so it’s the first place Nyota looks. If he isn’t there, she can tell herself she looked for him and the moment has passed. She can go on down to the planet alone and forget all about him. It might be nice to explore by herself anyway, or to find some of her female colleagues and have some girl time. Lord knows she has too much testosterone in her life these days anyway.

It’s just her luck that he’d be there after all. She should have known, really. If the past several months have taught her anything, it’s that if she is feeling lonely, he probably is too. It’s a shitty thing to have in common, and yet she can’t bring herself to really regret it. It could be worse. She could be _alone_ in her loneliness.

She can’t even sneak away before he sees her, because he looks up at the first sound of footsteps and his eyes narrow, his gaze pinning her in place.

“What’re you doing here?” he asks.

“I could ask you the same thing.” Despite the sudden nervous flutter around her heart, she finds her momentum again, steps through the door and lets it swish shut behind her. They have nothing to hide from; the med bay is empty and quiet, as is most of the rest of the ship, and yet she still breathes easier when they are shut away like this. “Doesn’t Kirk usually drag you to a bar every time the ship docks?”

McCoy pulls a face. It’s probably supposed to look like annoyance, but she sees it for the disappointment that it is. It took some time, but eventually she learned that all his negative emotions tend to look like annoyance at first glance. These days, she is pretty good at recognizing the real feelings hiding underneath. 

“Not this time,” he says. “He went with Spock to a museum.” He shakes his head, appalled. “A _museum_. During _shore leave_.”

A smile forms on her lips, even as she feels a renewed surge of disappointment herself. Maybe this is the real reason she was hoping she wouldn’t find him here today. Every time she comes to him, she’s hoping he’ll have answers, a way to fight past the constant knot in her chest and the lump in her throat. A way to stop feeling like a fly on the wall every time Kirk and Spock are involved. If anyone can figure out how to get over a lost cause, it’s Leonard McCoy, a man who has some experience in lost causes. But as of yet, he is no help.

Well, almost no help.

Against her better judgment, she slides closer until she’s resting against the desk right next to his arm, close enough that if she pivoted on her heel she could fall right into his lap. “They have a thirst for knowledge, those two,” she says, not even attempting to keep the sharpness out of her voice.

He snorts. “Are you saying I don’t?”

“You tell me. Did you want to spend your shore leave at a museum?”

The expression on his face tells her all she needs to know. But the thing is, _she_ sort of _did_ want to spend her shore leave at a museum. She wouldn’t even have minded being the third wheel—it happens to her often enough these days, and even if she has to endure a few extra pangs in her heart, she likes their company. They didn’t ask her though. She can understand why they didn’t invite McCoy, why didn’t they ask _her_?

McCoy sighs and leans back in his chair, looking up at her with those searching eyes she’s come to love and hate all at once. When he looks at her, she feels like he _sees_ her, stripped down and exposed. Which is saying something, given that he’s seen her naked. Several times now. 

“Uhura,” he says quietly.

She shakes her head, reaches up to sweep her ponytail over her shoulder. “Don’t.”

“Nyota.” He’s even quieter now, and more tender, and it makes her heart hurt. “It’s only natural for them to want to spend time alone.”

“I know that,” she snaps, a warning.

But he just can’t leave well enough alone. The doctor in him always comes out. “It’s not healthy to—”

“Oh.” She straightens suddenly, barely resisting the urge to stomp her foot like a petulant child. It’s ridiculous that he keeps trying to lecture her, like he isn’t carrying a torch for both of them too. Like he doesn’t look at them the same way she does. For heaven’s sake, half the ship could probably use this lecture. Chekov could use it. Most of the gold shirts. Easily eighty percent of the science department. The only thing that sets her and McCoy apart is that they are lucky enough to call Kirk and Spock friends rather than merely colleagues, and that added closeness might have given them both false hope at one point or another. So she’ll accept a lecture from him when he stops mothering Kirk or stops bickering with Spock like they’ve been married forty years. She’ll accept a lecture from him when he can tell her how to make these feelings go away.

“Wait,” McCoy says as she turns to go, his hand shooting out to grasp her elbow. “Wait.”

His hands seem so big when they touch her. His fingers nearly engulf her arm. He could break her, she thinks, but she knows that’s the last thing on his mind. He has always touched her like she’s a fragile thing, a precious thing, even when she sits on his exam table. The first time she came in for a physical, she was in awe of the softness of his hands, the gentleness with which he checked her over. He could rely on his instruments, his tricorder, but instead he is tactile. She appreciates it, truly. When he touches her, she feels it everywhere at once, and it makes her feel safe.

It makes her feel other things too, sometimes. When he releases her elbow and drops his hand to her ship, she sucks in a breath through her nose.

“You were looking for me,” he says. It isn’t a question. Why else would she be here?

Still, she straightens her shoulders, her neck, gathering her dignity about her. “I thought if you weren’t with Kirk and Spock, you might want some company.”

He looks troubled, and not for the first time she wishes she could read his mind. No—she wishes she had the courage to ask him to _tell her_ what’s on his mind, and she wishes he would have the courage to answer. It’s been months since this thing between them started, and the only feelings they’ve spoken about are the hurt and lingering betrayal they feel when it comes to their command team. Even then they only speak about it in the vaguest of terms, every statement heavily laden with irony so they don’t get close to being truly vulnerable. She knows McCoy is still angry—he has poured that anger into her body as she has poured hers into his—but she doesn’t know if that’s all they’re doing here, just sublimating their emotions in one another. She doesn’t know if this is an antidote for loneliness or something more than that. 

“Did you want to go planetside?” he asks her at last. His hand is still resting on her hip, his thumb rubbing absently at he fabric of her skirt.

She considers it, briefly. They could find something to eat or just wander for a while. It might even feel like a real date. But on the other hand, _it might feel like a real date._ “No,” she says, shaking her head. “I’d rather not.”

He reaches for her other hip then, and she lets him, lets him slide her closer and nudge her until she’s half-sitting on the desk, her leg pressed against his thigh. “What do you want then?”

Nyota closes her eyes. _I want them to have asked me to go with them to a museum_ , she thinks. _I want to be enough. I want to be enough to keep them here, with us._ It isn’t fair, and it isn’t right. She has spent months telling herself that friends want friends to be fulfilled, even if that fulfillment is only achieved through leaving. Most days, she even believes it.

But. _But_.

She can’t help but wish she had been a little more important to them.

“Nyota,” McCoy says gently, and then she feels his mouth on the inside of her knee, and a different kind of wanting sparks low in her belly, a less complicated kind. She doesn’t know how sleeping with him ever became something _uncomplicated_ , but it’s so easy to reach out and push her fingers through his hair, pull his head closer to the juncture of her thighs. She doesn’t have to open her eyes again to know what he looks like now, his expression a mix of resignation and wonder as he rubs his stubbled jaw against her skin. His fingers bunch up her skirt and push it out of the way. They skim the edges of her underwear, then push that aside too. This is what she really wants, she tells herself. Each time they do this, it gets a little easier to believe.

“Lock the door,” she tells him. No one is going to burst in on them here, not when almost everyone is down on the planet, but he obeys her anyway, barking an order at the computer. Then, his mouth is back, his tongue touching her and finding her already wet for him. Maybe she has been wet for him since she left her own quarters, knowing full well that this was where the afternoon was headed one way or another. If she hadn’t found him here, she probably would have kept looking until she did, no matter how she tells herself otherwise.

The first time they did this, McCoy had just found out that Jim had been thinking of leaving, and he had come straight to her, thinking she’d know something about it since she’d known about Spock. But she hadn’t known. She could have done without knowing. He had ranted at her, throwing around words like _disloyal_ and _liars_ and _alone_. That last one— _alone_ —was the difficult one. It was the one that made her cross to him and put her hands on his neck and pull him down so she could kiss him, her nails digging into his skin so he would know just how not alone he was. It was foolish of her, a stray impulse that would certainly have given way to embarrassment if he hadn’t clutched her back, kissed her back, pushed her down onto her bed and made her forget about everything that wasn’t his hands, his mouth. 

He is still so good at making her forget. He learned what she likes quicker than she thought any man could, and he never holds out on her, never makes her beg him or leaves her unsatisfied. It’s mere minutes before she’s shuddering under his mouth, and he gets up off the chair to kiss her and starts working his own pants open before she can ask for that too. He tugs her to the edge of the desk and enters her quickly, making her shout and clutch at his shoulders. He gets his mouth on her neck, her ear, and talks at her in that coarse voice she’s come to love.

“That’s it,” he says. A person shouldn’t be able to sound tender and obscene all at once, but he manages it. “This is what you needed, isn’t it?”

She doesn’t answer. She doesn’t have to. He knows what she needs.

If she’s being honest with herself, she has to admit that she loves the way he fucks. It’s all emotion, just on the right side of rough. He rarely seems to have control of himself, and it makes her feel powerful and beautiful and everything a woman _should_ feel. He isn’t putting on a show, isn’t trying to impress her with his prowess or project false confidence or make himself last for hours. It’s so genuine, so primal, like their ancestors must have done it in caves and huts thousands of years ago before every human interaction was laden with so much baggage. 

“Fuck,” he grunts as he slides his hands under her to pull her into him. “You always feel so damn good.” He says it with awe in his voice, like he keeps expecting things to change between them. Nyota gets that. She expects things to change too. She expects to stop wanting this eventually—and yet.

“More,” she tells him, arching her back. And he listens at once, redoubling his efforts so the desk rattles. Something crashes to the floor, but neither of them pay it any mind. Nyota is too busy hiking a leg higher up McCoy’s waist. McCoy is too busy reaching between their bodies to get a thumb on her clit.

He babbles when he gets close, garbled strings of curse words intermixed with her name in a voice so rough it makes her vibrate all over. He holds out long enough to bring her off again—ever the gentleman—but then his rhythm goes erratic and he drops his forehead to her chest and groans through his release. She wishes then that they’d undressed, so she could feel his mouth on her skin and could run his fingertips over the shifting muscles in his back. In moments like this, in the aftermath, she can never get close enough to him. She doesn’t want to pull her clothes back into place and run off. She wants to cradle him close, pet his hair, listen to the way he breathes. 

And he must feel the same, because he lingers. He kisses his way up her neck, licks at her earlobe, then finds her mouth. If he cares about the state of his desk, he doesn’t let on. Even when she starts to squirm and he pulls out, he doesn’t urge her to move or start tidying things around her. He merely tucks himself back into his pants and slumps back into the chair, pawing absently at his hair.

This is when Nyota feels closest to him. In these vulnerable, post-coital moments. This is when she wonders if it’s more than camaraderie she feels after all, and if her persistent feelings for Kirk, for Spock aren’t just force of habit. That can happen, she supposes. A person can get so used to feeling one way that it’s hard to stop. She doesn’t know if that’s what’s going on here or if it’s only what she _wants_ to be going on here.

“We can still go down to the planet if you want,” McCoy says just as the silence has stretched on a little too long. His hand finds her calf, but this time there’s no hint of suggestion in it, only comfort.

Nyota still doesn’t quite have her breath, but she twitches her skirt back down and smoothes it, rolling her head on her neck. “Do you want to, or are you just offering to be nice?”

He lifts an eyebrow at her. “When have you ever known me to be nice?”

To her? All the time. For all his general grumpiness, she wonders how well she’d be surviving right now if it weren’t for him. Doesn’t he know that? Perhaps he doesn’t know that.

“I could, um, eat. Maybe,” she says, not quite looking at him. She picks at the hem of her skirt. “We could go get some real, non-replicated food.”

For a moment, she is certain he’ll say no. He won’t do it meanly, but it will serve as reminder enough that though they are friends, and though they do this thing on the side, they can’t make it more than that. Their hearts lie elsewhere—with their captain and their commander—and it’s pointless to make this more than it is.

Or maybe not. Maybe he’ll stand up again and touch her arm, like this. Maybe he’ll wait for her to meet his eyes, and then he’ll smile, and then he’ll say, “Yeah, I guess I could eat.” Maybe he’ll unlock his door and tell her to go get cleaned up, and he’ll meet her outside her cabin.

Still, she can’t stop herself from turning back in the doorway and asking him, “Are you sure?”

When he smiles at her, it’s a little sad, a little stiff around the edges, but she has no doubt that he means it, and it gives her hope. “Get out of here before I change my mind,” he says.

She fights a smile on the way back to her quarters. She feels warm and satisfied as she slips under the sonics, more relaxed than she has in days. And it will be nice, she thinks, to spend time with him today, to keep herself distracted from all the things she’d rather not be thinking about. He will listen to her with real interest when she speaks, he’ll open doors and put his hand in the small of her back to guide her through them, and he’ll let her pick the food without question.

It would be easier, so much easier, if she could just love him instead.

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me on tumblr [here](http://semperama.tumblr.com/). Come say hi!


End file.
